Amused and Alarmed

Timegrab fashion concept

I've been feeling very bored with contemporary fashion (where "fashion" could mean what I wear; what I see on the street; or what's on runways: I am bored with all of them) but have also disliked all obvious alternatives, because in the current political moment, which is expressly reactionary (make America Great Again) anything past-glorifying suggests agreement to move backward on human rights, and anything futuristic is either retro-futurist (same problem) or suggests a dire future to which I am not resigned. (Yes, there is theoretical fashion like solarpunk, but the technology is not there. As for cutting-edge 3D-printed stuff, it is not suited to actual wearing by a human executing day-to-day tasks and is better classed as wearable sculpture.)

But of course "invent an entirely new fashion aesthetic" is heavy lifting. It's the dream of hundreds of people educated in fashion design. Who do not accomplish it. "Invent an entirely new fashion aesthetic that is affordable and doesn't take too much work" is unsurprisingly not simpler.

I'm playing around with the idea that you could square the circle with a style I'll call "timegrab" (because timepunk sounds great but the -punk suffix is way overused) which deliberately collages elements from wildly different timeperiods, but not in a way that suggests "I went to a vintage store and grabbed random things" so much as "I am not merely a time traveler but a time colonizer." Essentially a bohemian aesthetic for someone moving through time instead of geography, with an aggressive mien. A credo might be "you want to go back to the past? Fine. I'll get there first and fuck it up until it looks like what I like and you hate."

It seems like a promising high-concept, but I can't post pictures of this idea to see if it works because it'll take me a few months to find/make them, and I'm busy with other projects.

Probably deliberate/emphasized holes (where tears are reinforced rather than repaired) are key.

I hate how informal and ironically ugly everything has become. Like, who thought sweatpants out of the house were such a good idea that it's impossible to find pants that are not for old ladies, or are jeans or sweatpants? And all of the layers of transparent things. And that shade of pink.

Raiding the past and future seems like a good alternative. If fashion cycles are going to be sped up to a dizzying speed, why not just compress them all together?